Technology Network

      Google launched its latest Beta Labs product, the Google Fast Flip for the world to see. Fast Flip is nothing but a content browser that allows the user to virtually "flip pages" of online content in a faster (but not necessarily more convenient) way.

      The argument behind the existence of Fast Flip is the fact that it is a time consuming process to flip multiple whilst reading news online. According to Google, even with most broadband connections, it takes at least 10 seconds to load most media rich websites today. What Google wants here is to help you read news in the traditional way, where you just flip the page and have the content served to you in seconds. This, besides giving you a more "natural" feel to the reading experience, will also mean lesser time to flip pages. Google compares Fast Flip to reading a newspaper or a magazine where the reader can turn the pages in a second. Thus, according to them, this is way better than reading stuff before after waiting for the page to load.

      Now, having said all this, there is this problem that Fast Flip cannot solve. The content that you read is still "online" and what you see are nothing but cached images of the web pages of popular websites (Google has tied up with major websites to feature their content on Fast Flip and will even share ad revenues). The problem with this is that you will not be able to click on links within the page - oh and don't think of "scrolling down" as you can only move sideways and flip forward or backwards.

      But then, according to Google, Fast Flip offers the publishers multiple entry points to the original story - which might not be a bad idea after all. This is because, if you wish to proceed to the original article, you can simply click on the image and go to the source page, complete with the links and the original content. The initiative seems to be supported by quite a few publishers and for now, it would only feature those websites which were in the "tie-up". As of now, you cannot customize Fast Flip to include your own web pages. But then, we're not complaining since this is a Beta product and a cool one at that. Tried Fast Flip yet?